Bringing Up Father — buf400510

Four panels follow Jiggs and Maggie reading a letter from their son Sonny, who has had a car accident in Phoenix. Jiggs phones to investigate, only to learn he cannot retrieve his own car — the other driver ran into it pulling into a garage, and the repair shop has both vehicles. The strip ends on a silent exclamation-point panel, Maggie looming with fury. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, making it one of the longest-running strips in American syndication. McManus's clean ligne-claire figures, expressive silhouettes, and precisely lettered speech balloons helped standardize the visual grammar — panel grids, reactive close-ups, the wordless reaction beat — that comic books inherited wholesale when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips in the early 1930s.